Financial Quotes

Den senaste tiden har det i media diskuterats mycket om ojämnt fördelade förmögenheter och inkomster i olika länder. Mina två senaste blogginlägg har också fokuserat på denna fråga och huvudskälet till detta är att inkomstfördelning påverkar konsumtion som påverkar såväl företags försäljning och aktiepriser som länders bytesbalans och växelkurser och räntor . Med andra ord tror jag fördelningen av hushållens köpkraft är av stort intresse för den som är aktiv på finansmarknaden. Jag har funderat en del på fastighetspriser och deras kraftiga uppgångs effekt på fördelningen av köpkraft över landet och över generationerna. Inte minst är det intressant att studera vad det har för effekt på förmögenhetsöverföringen mellan generationer. Som ett första steg tänkte jag i detta inlägg visa hur rika de allra rikaste i Sverige, i bostadsmening, är. Idén till detta fick jag då jag häromdagen läste att du för att kvala in som ägare till ett av de 1% dyraste husen i San Fransisco måste punga ut med 3...

I wrote a short (ironic) piece in Financial Times last week that has attracted some attention. It was titled (by Financial Times) “Tax the socially wealthy, too!” You can find it here . From the title it is easy to draw the conclusion that I advocate more taxes. In fact, this is far from the truth. Instead, the letter was an ironic critique against the taxation of wealth, regardless of the shape of this wealth (i.e. savings, stocks, houses, social capital, human capital and so on). What I try to do in my Financial Times letter is to give an illustrative example demonstrating the problems with wealth taxation. I suggest a way for social capital to be treated just like other forms of capital, and how those with a lot of social capital could give some of this capital (N.B. not money but social capital) to those who are poor in social capital. I exemplify this using Facebook since those with many Facebook friends probably have more social capital than those with fewer friends. In other wor...

In an interesting paper titled “ Capital is back: wealth-income ratios in rich countries 1700-2010 ” Piketty and Zucman (2013) show how wealth-to-income ratios in rich countries have come back to the levels seen in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Between now and then, i.e. in the post-war period, the wealth-to-income levels were much lower. Today, the ratios in countries such as US, UK, France and Germany are around 400-600%, which is similar to the ratios from 1700 to 1900, while in 1970 the ratios were closer to 200-300%! I.e., there is a clear U-shape in the wealth-to-income ratios in all these countries. The U is most extreme in Italy (250% in 1970 and 650% today) and least extreme in Germany (200% in 1970 and 400% today) and in the US (300% in 1970 and 500% today). Interestingly, Piketty and Zucman (2013) argue that the low post-war ratios, particularly in Europe, appear to be a historical anomaly . They argue, and I cannot but agree, that the special circumstances of mass...

Ett nytt ” Byströms Börstips ” har publicerats i LINC MAGAZINE #5 2013 s.60-61. Börstipset kan hittas här och handlar om huruvida börsen går bättre i länder med mindre folk. Kanske en lite konstig fråga att ställa sig, eller? Jo, kanske det. Inte minst som jag inte känner till ngn teori som skulle kunna styrka antagandet att folktäthet skulle kunna vara kopplad till börsutvecklingen. Dock, avsaknad av teori innebär ju inte alltid avsaknad av empirisk evidens: ljusets böjdes t.ex. lika mkt vid dess passage kring himlakroppar innan Einstein kom ut med sin allmänna relativitetsteori 1916 som efter….. Dessutom, det är ju inte förbjudet att undersöka saker av denna typ bara för att en välgrundad bakomliggande teori saknas. Hur som helst, min korta och ganska ad hoc mässiga studie visar trots allt tydligt att om historien kan användas som kristallkula, så ska du köpa aktier i länder där folk inte trängs med varandra! Som figuren visar har en likaviktad portfölj med aktier från de folktomma ...

I just had to do the FT Worldwise test again. My results this time was 625/800. A slight improvement (rank 222 out of 1007). The proof is seen in the nice figure above.... :) I promise to not blog more about this until I reach at least the next level (expert?)........

I came across a web-test testing my skills in world business and politics today. It is called FT Worldwise , is administrated by Financial Times and is hosted by Smarterer.com . Being a keen follower of financial markets I wanted to test my knowledge of more general business/political issues relevant to investors. This is of course particularly interesting to us who consider ourselves global macro style investors. Why don’t you test it yourself? A nice feature which makes it impossible to inflate your results before sharing them to your friends (and employers….) is that you can choose to share your results via social media! Being a social media novice I actually managed to do that on my (almost) dormant linkedin site. For those of you who are not already connected to me I can reveal that my results were OK. I am evidently Proficient with a test result of 597 points out of 800. That puts me at rank 254 out of 995 . I think I can do better ( :) ) so I guess I have to redo the test again...

I think one of the more promising novelties in finance is the application of “big data” in financial research as well as in practical investment activities. The amount of data that is available in the world today is clearly huge. Most likely this is still just a fraction of the amounts that will be available in five or ten years’ time though. Similarly, the financial usage of (truly) huge data volumes, while definitely taking off already today, is still largely in waiting. Personally, I have touched upon big data in my own research and, for instance, in the paper News Aggregators, Volatility and the Stock Market I collect news volumes using a certain well-known and web-based news aggregator . While this paper focused on news in English (currently the dominant language for web news) I have also looked at news volumes in Chinese (Mandarin, potentially a future dominant in web news) and the picture is the same, at least for the Hong Kong market; the link between stock volatilities and th...